Dark Mysteries of the Vatican

CHAPTER 15

And God Created Aliens

Energized by the statement by the head of the Vatican ’s observatory that there was no conflict between the tenets of the Church and belief in extraterrestrial life, adherents of the theory that unidentified objects in the sky (UFOs) carry beings from outer space contend that the Vatican has known about them since the 1950s. It is said by UFO exponents, who communicate with each other primarily via the Internet, that Pope Pius XII decided to create a secret information department with a structure similar to the military intelligence departments of the United States and Britain. Its purpose was to gather all possible information regarding the activities of the alien entities and information acquired by the U.S. Air Force in its investigations of UFO reports. The codename for this program was said to be “Secretum Omega.”

One Internet site asserted that skeletal remains resembling space aliens had been excavated from the basement floor of a centuries old vault under the Vatican Library. According to this report, the discovery occurred because the library was undergoing a major restoration to its underground vaults, containing dirt floors that had not felt a human foot in more than 500 years.

Another website presented an enlarged, technically enhanced photograph of a purported UFO hovering near the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, taken by a Polish tourist in St. Peter’s Square on June 24, 2006.

Numerous contributors to UFO chat rooms find evidence of life beyond Earth in the Bible. They interpret the Prophet Ezekhial seeing “a wheel, way up in the middle of the air; the big wheel ran by faith and the little wheel ran by the grace of God, a wheel in a wheel, away in the middle of the air.” These wheels were turning, one wheel within the other. Also cited was Jacob in the book of Genesis seeing a ladder set up on the earth that reached to heaven; and “behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending.”

UFO believers cited news coverage of Pope John Paul II lying in state that purportedly showed an unidentified flying object over St. Peter’s Basilica.

Should it prove to be true that the Vatican has secret files on UFOs and beings from outer space, it’s nothing new. In the fifteenth century, Cardinal Nicolo Cusano (1401-1464), philosopher and scientist, said, “We are not authorized to exclude that on another star beings do exist, even if they are completely different from us.”

While Vatican astronomers search the skies in the hope of learning about the secrets of the universe, archeologists have been exploring beneath the Vatican to learn more about the origins of the Church. Excavations began in June 1939. They found that two levels below St. Peter’s Basilica lies an excavated Roman graveyard full of mausoleums, frescoes, inscriptions and stucco decorations. It was here in the 1940s that experts uncovered the bones of a tall man whose grave had been venerated in early times. Many thought they were the bones of St. Peter, believed to have been martyred in Nero’s Circus nearby. But Time magazine noted, “What the excavators found was a looted grave, so despoiled (probably by the Saracens in 846) that much of it was a featureless hole. There was no trace of the bronze casket in which tradition said Constantine had placed St. Peter’s relics. All that remained, buried at the rear of the grave niche, were a few bones. The Vatican has said only that they are human, that there is no skull among them, and that they are those of a powerfully built person of advanced age but undetermined sex.”

In June 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that bones unearthed during the excavations under St. Peter’s Basilica were, in his judgment, those of Peter the Apostle. “The relics of St. Peter,” he declared, “have been identified in a manner which we believe convincing.”

He based his conclusion on “very patient and accurate investigations” by “worthy and competent persons.”

Vatican archeologists also believed that they identified the tomb of St. Paul in the Roman basilica that bears his name. A sarcophagus was identified in the basilica of St. Paul. The sarcophagus was discovered during excavations carried out in 2002 and 2003 around the basilica, in the south of Rome.” The tomb that we discovered,” said archaeologist Giorgio Filippi,” is the one that the popes and the Emperor Theodosius (379-395) saved and presented to the whole world as being the tomb of the apostle.”

The discovery was made by a team composed exclusively of experts from the Vatican Museum. They had undertaken their exploration in response to a request from the administrator of St. Paul ’s basilica, Archbishop Francesco Gioia. During the Jubilee Year 2000, the archbishop noticed that thousands of pilgrims were inquiring about the location of St. Paul ’s tomb. The excavation effort was guided by nineteenth century plans for the basilica, which was largely rebuilt after a fire in 1823. An initial survey enabled archeologists to reconstruct the shape of the original basilica, built early in the fourth century. A second excavation, under the main altar of the basilica, brought the Vatican team to the sarcophagus, which was located on what would have been ground level for the original fourth-century building.

The Catholic World News Service reported that under the altar a marble plaque was still visible. Dating back to the fourth century, it bore the inscription: “Apostle Paul, martyr.”

As an archeologist, Filippi said that he had no special curiosity to learn whether the remains of St. Paul were still inside that sarcophagus. He said that the tomb should not be opened merely to satisfy curiosity, but he had no doubt that St. Paul was buried on the site, “because this basilica was the object of pilgrimages by emperors; people from all around the world came to venerate him, having faith that he was present in this basilica.”

In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI gave his approval to plans by investigators to examine the interior of the ancient stone coffin. They were given permission to remove a plug with which the coffin had been sealed so an endoscopic probe could be inserted and the contents viewed.

While excavations were being carried out inside Vatican City in 2003 for an underground garage to ease the Vatican ’s parking problems a 2,000-year-old burial ground was discovered. The necropolis, which traces pagan Rome to the birth of Christianity, contained more than forty elaborately decorated mausoleums and 200 individual tombs. Headstones, including one that belonged to a slave of Nero, urns and elaborately decorated frescoes and mosaic floors were uncovered on the site.

The historical importance of the find was described as second only to the necropolis below St Peter’s Basilica. The Guardian of London reported that Giandomenico Spinola, director of the project, described the necropolis as being in an excellent condition because it had been protected by a landslide at the end of the second century. Most of the tombs dated between the era of Augustus (23B.C.-A.D.14) to that of Constantine (306-337).

A monument to Pope Leo XI, a Medici, in white marble, by Alessandro Algardi (1645-1646), took much longer to create than Leo XI reigned. Seventy years old and rather frail when he was elected, he was the 232nd pope and died just twenty-six days into his reign (April 1-27, 1605). Born in Florence, he was the last of the Medici family’s popes. His mother, Francesca Salviati, was a daughter of Giacomo Salviati and Lucrezia de’ Medici, a sister of Leo X, while his father, Ottaviano, was a more distant scion of the Medici family. King Henry IV of France, who had learned to like Leo XI when he was papal legate at his court, is said to have bank-rolled promotion of his election. When Leo took sick after his coronation, he was importuned by many members of the Curia to make one of his grandnephews a cardinal, but Leo had such an aversion to nepotism that he refused. When his confessor urged him to grant it, he dismissed him and sent for another. Because of the brevity of his papacy, the Italians called him Papa Lampo (Lightning Pope).

Algardi also memorialized Pope Leo I, who saved Rome from Attila when the Mongolian conqueror, King of the Huns, was ready and waiting to cross the Po River with his horde and attack the city. Leo, in papal robes, entered Attila’s camp, stood before Attila, and threatened him with the power from St. Peter if he did not turn back and leave Italy unmolested. When Attila agreed to turn back, his servants reportedly asked him why he had capitulated so easily to the Bishop of Rome. Attila answered that all the while the Pope was speaking, there had appeared in the sky above the Pope’s head a vision of St. Peter with drawn sword.

A papal tomb not found in the Vatican is that of Pope Alexander VI.

Historian Elizabeth Lev wrote that generally in the history of the papacy, Pope Alexander VI does not make it into the list of the top ten, twenty or thirty. She wrote, “Alexander became to the papacy what Nero is to the Roman empire, the Pope critics love to hate.” Born Roderigo Borgia in 1431 near Valencia, Spain, he rose to the rank of cardinal with the help of his uncle Pope Callistus III, then, as a favorite of Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, he was elected Pope in 1492 while Columbus was discovering America in the employ of the same Spanish sovereigns. Contemporaries viewed this election with much trepidation, Lev noted, because all the contracts and titles related to the vast enterprise of the New World would be in Spanish hands.

Alexander did little to court public opinion, exasperating many by leading an openly licentious life and favoring his children, particularly Cesare Borgia, who was accused of several murders during Alexander’s pontificate and was protected if not abetted by his father. Alexander VI fathered seven children, including Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia, by at least two mistresses. Such was Alexander VI’s unpopularity that when he died, perhaps by poisoning, perhaps from the plague, in 1503 at the age of seventy-two, the priests of St Peter’s Basilica at first refused to accept his body for burial. He died on August 18, 1503, in the twelfth year of his pontificate. He was buried on August 19 in the church of Santa Maria della Febbre, Rome, and his body was transferred in 1610 to the church of Santa Maria di Monserrato in Rome.

More than four centuries after the dome of St. Peter’s basilica was completed, the Vatican announced the discovery of a long-missing Michelangelo sketch for the dome, possibly his last design before his death. Drawn in blood-red chalk for the stone cutters who were working on the basilica, it was done in the spring of 1563, less than a year before his death at age ninety. The sketch was found in the Fabbrica of St. Peter’s, which contains the basilica’s offices.

The newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said most sketches by Michelangelo for the stone cutters were destroyed or lost in the cutters’ workplaces, but this one had survived because a supervisor used the back of the sketch to make notes of problems linked to the stone’s transport through the outskirts of Rome. Michelangelo finished the dome and four columns for its base before he died in February 1564. Three weeks before he died, when he was nearly eighty-nine, he went up the dome to inspect it.

The construction of the basilica, whose cupola defines Rome ’s skyline, spanned several working lifetimes of some of the Renaissance’s most celebrated artists and architects. Vatican historians note that the first architect of the basilica, Donato Bramante, died eight years after the cornerstone was laid. Other architects, including Raphael, followed, until Pope Paul III turned to Michelangelo in 1546, thirty-two years after Michelangelo had put his last brush stroke on the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

Also in 2007, the Associated Press reported that a 450-year-old receipt found in the same archive provided proof that Michelangelo had kept a private room in St. Peter’s Basilica while working as the pope’s chief architect. Going through archives for an exhibit on the 500th anniversary of the basilica, researchers from the Fabbrica di San Pietro came across an entry for a key to a chest located “in the room in St. Peter’s where Master Michelangelo retires.”

“We now know that Michelangelo definitely had a private space in the basilica,” said Maria Cristina Carlo-Stella, who runs the Fabbrica, in an interview with the Associated Press. “The next step is to identify it.”

The ink-scripted entry contained in a parchment-covered volume listing the expenditures of the Fabbrica for the years 1556-58, referred to the payment of ten scudos to the blacksmith who forged the key, but offered no details about the chest or the location of the room.

The account of the discovery noted that a frescoed room with a cozy fireplace, part of the area in the left wing of the basilica where the archives are housed, had traditionally been called “la stanza di Michelangelo” (Michelangelo’s room). On an upper floor, overlooking the main altar, it is connected to the ground floor by a small winding marble staircase, suggesting that the room afforded the artist secrecy and an escape route from envious fellow artisans. But research showed the room was part of renovation done after Michelangelo’s death, and that the space did not exist during Michelangelo’s time at the Vatican.

“”The theory is very romantic and conspiratorial, but totally unfounded,” said Federico Bellini, an art historian who worked in the archive department.

Originally the Fabbrica, whose documents date from as far back as 1506, was in the right wing of the basilica, already built at the time of Michelangelo. It was known that artisans had been allotted lodgings there, leading experts to direct their search for Michelangelo’s studio to that area.

The Associated Press article noted, “One detail the expenditure does reveal is that Michelangelo had requested a very expensive key. According to Simona Turriziani, a Fabbrica archivist, ten scudos in the 1550s was more than the monthly salary of many of the artisans working on the basilica.”